Salt Air
First of all, I’m Fine (with a capital F), and there’s nothing to worry about, but since I’m in the process of switching jobs, I have more time than usual on my hands so I’m naturally going a bit stir crazy.
With that said, here is some of what’s running through my head.
I’ve been an Anne Boleyn girlie ever since I came across her in a picture book biography of her daughter, Queen Elizabeth I, in the 2nd grade. I learned how King Henry VIII had his second wife, Anne Boleyn, murdered for not giving him a son, only a daughter, the future queen of England, and my righteous 7-year-old anger was incandescent. Anne Boleyn was beheaded at Tower Green in the Tower of London on May 19, 1536, and by the time I read more into her death, I was already a staunch atheist, but despite that, I can’t let go of the image of Anne on her knees, blindfolded at the feet of the executioner as he drew his sword, repeating to herself, “O Lord God have pity on my soul.”
The year I was born, India banned knowing the sex of a fetus prior to birth because too many women were having sex-selective abortions; they wanted sons to take of them, not daughters who would go off and marry out of the home, and their selfish desires were killing the national gender ratio. But my parents always wanted a girl, and were ecstatic when I was born. From the moment I was born (8.5 pounds and too big for my mother who weighed less than I do now when 9 months pregnant), our extended families and acquaintances would demand of my father why he didn’t make his wife have another child and my dad would stare blankly at them and say, “It’s her choice, she doesn’t want to have another kid, and I’m happy with my daughter.” My parents have always loved me unconditionally, the way we all love Jude (the golden retriever) today, and for that, I’m extremely lucky.
In early 2016, I wrote that I was afraid I would never escape my history of violence against myself, and now, 7 years later, I can honestly say that I haven’t. I think that it’s become a part of me, just as much as my dark hair and the birthmark in the center of my chest and the double jointed ring finger on my left hand. I sometimes wish I wasn’t the kind of person who has stared death in the face, but there’s no way to undo the acts of violence against myself which led to that reckoning. I vacillate between feeling much older than my 28 years because I’ve been to (metaphorical, atheist) hell and back in a way I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy but on the other hand, I feel like I’ve lost years of my life to the fog of living death. To be very clear, I’m categorically not contemplating death in the active sense, not remotely, I intend to turn 30 and 50 and maybe even 70, but I sometimes feel the expectation of my forthcoming death I held within me for over half my life weighing down on my shoulders, threatening collapse on my darker days.
In Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin writes that for him, suicide would have been an act of revenge, a way of informing the world how awfully it had made him suffer, but for me, it wasn’t that deep. Simply put, I didn’t want to punish the world or feel guilt for my perceived sins, I just didn’t want to be alive, and I took meticulous, highly disciplined steps, in character as ever, to make that come about. When I was 17, and once again when I was 20, I got dangerously far into the woods that blanket the undiscovered country that is the space between life’s end and before death begins in earnest. However, both times, when faced with the prospect of leaving this earthly mortal coil, taking on the age-old mantle of one of those legendary travelers who would never to return to the land of the living, I paused. I didn’t fear death at 17 or at 20, and I don’t even now, years removed from those times, so I’ve come to frame my electing to backtrack, to brave the earthly ills I was well acquainted with head on, as the ultimate act of courage.
All that said, I don’t remember the overarching narrative of the worst times in my life and can recall only details. I remember spending the night in the computer lab on the ground floor of the engineering building the night before my real analysis exam (it went badly), walking back from the Teriyaki place in Collegetown the night before spring break freshman year of college (I had the extra spicy tofu) and missing my flight home the next morning because I overslept, and crying a lot on a plane to Boston when I was 16 and being caught by a girl in my class who promptly told everybody we knew, which made next 10 months of high school tedious at best and traumatic at worst. For the record, even over a decade later, I don’t forgive her.
But nowadays, I’m far more optimistic than I used to be. I mean, to be fair, I’ve always been more of a disappointed optimist than a pessimist or even a realist, but now, I’ve stopped letting the world let me down. It’s not that things could be worse although of course they can, it’s that there’s a lot of things to celebrate in my life. So I’ll go on, as I always have, and we will see how things turn out in the days, weeks, months, and years to come.
Ending this missive with a reminder for the road: